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Comment by 16bitvoid | Hacker News Reader

We get it, you don't have a passion for the act or the craft, just the end result, but I'm absolutely sick of hearing it all over this site as if it's a universal truth that some of us just don't recognize yet.

Sorry, some of us have a joy for programming where the how is just as important, if not more so, than the what and the why. No matter how much people proclaim that the how doesn't matter to them, it isn't going to suddenly make it true for others.

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+1. I’m in the exact opposite camp, I enjoy programming more than “shipping a product”. But the programming itself, coming up with solutions to tough problems, is the fun part. Shipping a product is a side-effect.

Training a lion to jump through a hoop might be fun, but it is probably more rewarding when the lion jumps through a hoop in front of an audience.

Claude: Solve this jigsaw puzzle for me...

If solving jigsaw puzzles with claude will enable the creation of tools that help the people I want to help (students with disabilities), then I would use it for that, without feeling any guilt at all for doing so.

Why should I regret that? Why should I care about your purity tests?

Nobody said you should? Some people merely enjoy programming more than engineering.

> Nobody said you should?

This is dishonest. Your quip was to imply that I'm reducing what is otherwise a fun activity to an automation, on the basis of a purity test.

> Some people merely enjoy programming more than engineering.

And I haven't said otherwise, so I'm not sure what point youre trying to make. My initial goal was to provide my own viewpoint on how to enjoy the process while taking advantage of modern tools, not to tell people they shouldn't enjoy programming more than engineering.

But ultimately you got into this craft to solve a problem. That is how the craft developed. And when you build a very complex elaborate system, it can still have interesting technical challenges, even for a developer with AI. You should shift your technical insight to a higher abstraction level, where the AI cannot help anymore.

What’s interesting to me is reasoning about the problem and its implementation. And that doesn’t stop at any abstraction level. Reasoning in the small is just as important as reasoning in the large. And the issue with LLMs is that their capacity for sound reasoning is limited. They are sloppy on any level. You can’t get them to be thorough and dependable in reasoning, regardless of the abstraction level.

Well I think the reasoning of coding agents on lower levels is good enough for me that I don't have to constantly be involved with it, only occasionally have to dive in and help out.

I don’t think that the logical reasoning ability of LLMs depends on the abstraction level. Their heuristic knowledge differs between levels, but that’s a different thing. My concern is the reasoning capabilities.

And so you experience that AI generated code, even on lower levels, is not good enough for you to be more productive?

It may be good enough to make me more productive, but only because I don’t relent on ensuring that the code is well-reasoned. Indeed, I don’t experience that when I do relent.

Ok, so you're basically saying that the AI-generated code does it's job, but when you actually review it you think the way it does it's job is not as it should, and if you get into that flow, your agentic productivity goes down?

> . You should shift your technical insight to a higher abstraction level, where the AI cannot help anymore.

As a programmer, you also had to work at that higher abstraction level anyway.

It's a myth that you are "moving" up a level; you were always at that level, just not exclusively.

Yes you're right. It's that most programmers are so identified with the code, that now with AI they feel their whole identity is stolen, while indeed, being a developer is more than just coding, people!

You okay?

This isn't a response I expect from people who are here for a productive discussion. I'm sorry that you are sick of hearing this, but I'm not responsible for making sure you only read what you find worthy of your own personal brand of respect. Instead of attacking someone for simply offering their point of view, in what appears to be a quasi-gatekeeping effort, maybe you should look inward and discover what is making you this upset toward a complete stranger.

__I cannot take away the joy you have for programming simply by stating what drives me.__

I'm totally fine, just annoyed by how much this "try not to think too hard about the how and think more about the why and what"[0] is getting brought up every single time someone mentions why they prefer hand coding to vibe coding. At this point, it's being overstated, thus gives off less "this is why I use it" and more "come on, get onboard the hypetrain to dystopia or you're going to get left behind". It's hardly conducive to a "productive discussion" when it's the millionth time as a drive-by comment. What kind of response did you expect?

Look, I don't have a problem with your personal motivation. I just hate seeing it suggested that people should abandon their passion because someone else doesn't share it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with "I enjoy making something useful" just as there's nothing wrong with "I enjoy making something with my hands or figuring out how to make it". My problem is with "your enjoyment of that is invalid because I don't enjoy that, so learn to enjoy this".

0: Not really a statement of your drive, is it? More of a directive or suggestion.

> At this point, it's being overstated

then so is your opinion on the matter. this goes both ways. I can just as easily dismiss your commentary as "drive-by".

> Not really a statement of your drive, is it? More of a directive or suggestion.

Yeah, so was my initial comment. Merely a suggestion concerning view points, and how a shift in that can bring back some amount of joy.

You don't have the moral high ground here.

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